Re: [coreutils] coreutils-7.0 expr exposes long-standing bug in matlab startup script

[Pádraig Brady]

Nelson H. F. Beebe wrote:
> I've just filed a bug report with The Mathworks, vendor of the
> widely-used Matlab matrix algebra system.  Their bin/matlab startup
> script (all versions up to current) contains code like this:
> 
>       if [ `expr "$lscmd" : '.*->.*'` -ne 0 ]; then
> 
> With native versions of expr, and expr from GNU coreutils prior to
> version 7.0, the expansion of lscmd usually begins "-rw-r--r--", but
> the leading hyphen does not cause the word to be treated as an option.

I think that was an unintended change introduced when adding getopt to expr:
http://git.savannah.gnu.org/gitweb/?p=coreutils.git;a=commitdiff;h=f65cafd67b33009d23f940968bbe7f9a08d6fe13

Pádraig.